Review: ‘Hot Girls Wanted,’ About the Choices Actresses in Pornography Make

“Hot Girls Wanted” is a documentary with a provocative subject and title but an uncertain tone that vacillates between weary outrage and motherly concern. Hanging out with young women — from 18 to their early 20s — who have chosen to work in pornography, the directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus and the writer Brittany Huckabee face a challenge: respecting the right of their subjects to make the choices they do while abhorring those decisions.

The resulting film, which played at Sundance this year and has its commercial premiere on Netflix on Friday, doesn’t really make a serious attempt to reconcile those viewpoints. It’s a reality-television-style slice of life, using statistics about online pornography viewership and Twitter screen shots for topicality and awkward scenes of one woman’s visits home for emotion. Its default mode is twangy sentimentality, cued by the plaintive songs on the soundtrack (one of them performed in part by the actress Rashida Jones, a producer of the film).

But the scenes of a group of teenage and 20-something women sharing a featureless suburban house in Florida, watched over by an apparently amiable, eerily blank young talent agent who is a combination of concierge and pimp, are authentic and effective — banal, sad, funny and weird. The camera lingers on bare floors dotted with open suitcases and spindly bedside tables holding jar candles and boxes of Walgreens feminine douches, trying to enforce a sense of anomie and innocence lost, but the filmmakers didn’t have to bother. The pathos is right on the surface, as the women stroke their tiny dogs and discuss money, independence and the absolute necessity of escaping their parents.

“Hot Girls Wanted” traces a narrative path from eager expectation to jaded cynicism — it’s the old Hollywood starlet story — as we learn that most of the women experience a compressed career of a few months in the “amateur” pornography field before being pushed aside by new arrivals. The scarier, even more callous side of the business appears in due course as the women sign on for niche videos to keep the checks coming in. It is, however, made clear that the work is still performance, distasteful and upsetting as it might be for the female performers.

There’s an interesting story about class and the American economy in “Hot Girls Wanted,” even if it’s not the story the filmmakers want to focus on: how the women who answer “must be 18” Craigslist ads say they prefer what they’re doing, at least at first, to the dead-end jobs available in their hometowns. As Rachel, an 18-year-old from Oswego, Ill., says in her Miami living room after a shoot: “Are you kidding me? I made $900 in five hours. I’m going to go home and make $8.25 an hour? No. No no no no.”

Correction:

A television review on Thursday about the documentary “Hot Girls Wanted,” on Netflix, misidentified the role of the actress Rashida Jones, a producer of the film, in a song on the soundtrack. The song, “Wanted to Be Loved,” was performed by Ms. Jones and one other person, not written by Ms. Jones and one other person.

Correction:

A television review last Thursday about the documentary film “Hot Girls Wanted” on Netflix, which looks at young women who have chosen to work in pornography, referred imprecisely to statistics about online pornography viewership shown during the film. While the information appears on screen without attribution, as the review noted, the opening credits cite Debby Herbenick and Bryant Paul of the Kinsey Institute, whose research for the film is the source of the information.